[OT] Stressing hardware under windows

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

Dear People,

This is a offtopic question, but is related to Linux in that I need to do
something in Windows I can easily do in Linux, and I wondered if someone
could help me.

I'm about to purchase a machine to install Debian on, but the people I'm
getting it from only support Windows. I want to put the hardware under
some load, but there doesn't seem to be any canonical way to do this in
Windows. If they know Linux stuff I would just ask them to recompile the
kernel a bunch of times. But this is probably not an option here.

A friend suggested that I simply use a simple C program that will simply
write to and from the hard disk very fast, and then keep it running on the
machine. I wouldn't know how to write something like this off the top of
my head. Does anyone have anything like this to hand or have other
suggestions?

Please CC me; I'm not on the list. Thank you.

                                         Sincerely, Faheem Mitha.